A California man was charged last Wednesday with blowing up two Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) transformers, causing power outages to households in the San Francisco area in December and January.
Local ABC affiliate KGO reported:
The suspect has been identified as 36-year-old San Jose resident Peter Karasev who made his first court appearance on Friday.
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Investigators say surveillance video and cell phone pings led them to Karasev who was arrested on Wednesday.
Police also say he had an “inactive” meth lab in his home and admitted to using methamphetamine as a replacement for Adderall during the shortage.
Karasev was denied bail — a noteworthy decision in a state that has pushed to eliminate bail for many crimes.
Karasev is married and has three children, and works as a software engineer. He had reportedly been struggling to deal with news about the war between Russia and Ukraine, since he is related to people who live in both. KGO added that police found so much explosive material in his home that their investigation was expected to take a long time.
There have been previous attacks on electricity infrastructure in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, the Wall Street Journal noted, a sniper attack on a local power station raised concerns for the security of Silicon Valley:
The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
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Nobody has been arrested or charged in the attack at PG&E Corp.’s Metcalf transmission substation. It is an incident of which few Americans are aware. But one former federal regulator is calling it a terrorist act that, if it were widely replicated across the country, could take down the U.S. electric grid and black out much of the country.
The incident raised alarm bells within counterterrorism policy circles about the vulnerability of the U.S. grid.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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